All American Boy

by William J. Mann

  Luz Maria Carmelita Sanchez Vargas was her name. Almond eyes, black hair, beauty mark. She’d won a beauty contest at school in Puerto Rico, and Regina could see why. They became friends, Luz and Regina, with the girl seeming to like the older woman as much as Regina liked her. They’d sit together at the kitchen table while Kyle was out, Luz helping Regina with her puzzles. She was very good at them. And they’d talk, and drink orange tea, and laugh. It had been so long since Regina had laughed.

  And, oh! How the police have hounded poor Luz. “They have been asking me all sorts of questions,” Luz told her yesterday, near tears. “They said I had to know something. But I don’t, Mrs. Day! You believe me, don’t you?”

  “Yes, of course, dear.”

  Every day since Kyle was reported missing, Luz has visited Regina. They don’t talk much about him. They talk about other things, like the weather, and school, and how proud Luz had been to win that beauty contest. Luz makes Regina smile, and she’s started helping her around the house, too. One day, the girl had spotted Regina wheeling her little cart of groceries and saw how difficult it was for Regina to lift the bags from it.

  “Let me help you,” Luz insisted.

  “Oh, thank you, dear. Arthritis, you know.”

  Now, every week, Luz takes her grocery shopping and helps her clean around the house, vacuuming, dusting, scouring the sink. Regina watches the girl work as if mesmerized.

  “Here,” Regina said yesterday, when the girl had finished vacuuming. “Let me give you something.” She opened her purse and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill.

  “Oh, no,” Luz objected. “Please, no.”

  “But can’t I give you anything for your help, Luz?”

  “No, no, no, Mrs. Day,” Luz said. “I like helping you.”

  “Bless you, dear,” Regina said, and snapped shut her black patent-leather purse. On its surface, Regina saw the reflection of her face.

  “Mother.”

  Her eyes flutter back to her son.

  “I think you need to see a doctor,” he’s saying.

  Yes, there’s compassion in his voice. Regina is sure of it.

  “It’s difficult for me to get around,” she protests. It’s true. She’d never learned to drive. Rocky died in a car crash. Regina can’t imagine ever being behind the wheel of a car.

  Walter sighs. “Make an appointment and I’ll take you tomorrow.”

  She blinks.

  “Will you do it?”

  “All right, Walter.”

  He turns to leave.

  “But the soil, Walter—”

  He looks back at her.

  “Will you get the soil?”

  “Why am I doing any of this?” he suddenly shouts. “Why the fuck did I come back here?”

  Regina takes a step backward, startled by his outburst. Yes, like Robert. So much like Robert.

  “Because I needed your help, Walter,” she says in a tiny voice. “You came because I needed your help.”

  “No, Mother. That’s not why I came. Do you know why I finally agreed to come back to Brown’s Mill? Any clue?”

  She says nothing.

  “Because I want to find Zandy.”

  Regina makes that sound in her throat again.

  “You know who I mean, Mother.” He says the name deliberately. “Alexander Reefy.”

  She looks away.

  “He’s the reason I came back here, Mother. Not you. I want to find Zandy and apologize to him for sending him to jail.”

  Once, she’d been a girl who thought maybe, just maybe, she might become a famous singer. She and Rocky both. What did the Andrews Sisters have on the Gunderson Sisters? Regina and Rocky were both pretty enough and talented enough. “Voices as sweet as birdsong,” the Brown’s Mill Reminder had declared after their gig at the VFW hall. So they ran off to the city to become famous. Eventually, Aunt Selma sent Uncle Axel to reclaim them in his old Ford pickup truck, but for a while, there had been the stage, and the microphone, and all those servicemen applauding, hooting, whistling with their pinkies between their teeth.

  She looks up at her son.

  “The soil, Walter. Please will you get the soil?”

  3

  BEYOND THE RAINBOW

  On the soundtrack: Judy Garland is singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” On the screen: a door slowly opens, wiping away blacks and whites to reveal bright primary Technicolors. Fade in on a rock garden, green leaves and orange marigolds, and a little boy in a bright red shirt playing with shiny Matchbox cars in the dirt.

  “I’ll get you, my pretty,” Wally cackles, doing an awfully good Margaret Hamilton for a seven-year-old boy. He drives a miniature Corvette straight into a dump truck and cackles again.

  The Wizard of Oz was on TV three nights before, and Wally’s become completely obsessed. He draws pictures of melted witches and asks his teacher questions like, “What did the winged monkeys do with the melted witch-goop?” He imagines that they used it to mold the witch back to life. After all, once the witch was gone, the movie had become far less exciting, so Wally has mapped out an elaborate sequel in his head. The Witch returns from the dead to capture the Scarecrow and the Tin Man. Glinda gets tossed in the dungeon, and Dorothy has to return to save the day. In his mother’s rock garden, Wally plays all the characters, using his Matchbox cars to enact the story because his father won’t let him play with dolls.

  Sitting in the dirt, Wally decides he wants to be Dorothy. He wants all those things that happened to her to happen to him. He wants a cyclone to pick him up and drop him down in the middle of flowers and thatched cottages and round-faced Munchkins. He wants to meet a pink lady in a flying bubble who wears sparkling dresses. He wants to melt the Witch. And he wants to see the Emerald City, most of all.

  Lighting cue: sunny sky begins to darken. Heavy, black-rimmed clouds roll in as if on fast-motion. Wally looks up, suddenly fearful, wide-eyed. He starts to run, then stops, remembering his Matchbox cars. He scoops them up and darts off toward his house, just as a thunderclap reverberates on the soundtrack. The wind shrieks, the rain begins to pound.

  Cut to: a gleaming kitchen with orange wallpaper and avocado green appliances. “Take your shoes off if they’re wet, Walter,” a voice says. Close-up of Wally’s mother, a tired, attractive blond woman in her forties, standing at an ironing board. She has large turquoise curlers in her hair.

  “Are we having a cyclone?” Wally asks.

  “No, I think just a thunderstorm,” his mother replies, as if she’s disappointed.

  “Mommy,” Wally suddenly announces. “I want to be a witch for Halloween.”

  “A witch?”

  “Yes. And not a witch with a mask. I want to be a witch with a pointed hat and a long clay nose that you make for me.”

  “I don’t know, Walter.”

  “Please?”

  The thunder gets louder.

  “Please, Mommy?”

  “We’ll see, Walter. Go to your room now and get ready for supper.”

  Fade to: a boy’s room. There’s a desk, a globe, and a poster of the Partridge Family on the wall. The door opens. Wally enters.

  He jumps up onto his bed. He’s listening to the roars of the thunder and feeling just a little bit afraid. What if a cyclone did pick up his house—tearing it from its cellar, ripping it out of the ground as if it were a weed, exposing a gaping, obscene hole in their half-acre lot in their quiet little cul-de-sac? What then? Mommy’s gone outside; Wally can hear the regular squeaks of the clothesline as she pulls his shirts and underpants in from the rain. What if the cyclone picks up the house while he’s in here alone? The thought terrifies. Suddenly Wally doesn’t want to go to Oz. (On the soundtrack, the loudest boom yet.) He thinks of Dorothy in the Witch’s Castle, and puts his pillow over his head.

  Judy Garland’s face suddenly fills the screen. “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again,” she says, “I won’t look any farther than my own backyard.”

  Wally had lift
ed his face to his mother as he lay on the floor watching the final credits roll. His mother sat across the room, at a little table, putting together a jigsaw puzzle of the Last Supper.

  “What does ‘heart’s desire’ mean?” the boy asked.

  His mother hadn’t answered him for several seconds. “I don’t know, Walter,” she finally said. “I suppose it means something you want but you can’t have.”

  Now Wally sits here on his bed listening to the thunder and thinking about Dorothy and her heart’s desire. Whatever it is—and he isn’t quite sure—Dorothy learned that it had been in her own backyard all along. He thinks of the stretch of lawn out behind his house. There wasn’t much to his backyard, just his mother’s rock garden and the three-foot-tall poplar trees his father had planted the last time he was home. Is that where it is, his heart’s desire?

  Last night, he’d slept over Freddie Piatrowski’s house, developing a terrible case of homesickness. He had really been convinced that he wanted to stay the night, lugging over his sleeping bag and sixteen issues of Action Comics, but when it got dark and Freddie’s sister Helen kept screaming upstairs, Wally started having second thoughts. Looking out the window, he saw his reflection in the dark glass, but he imagined instead he was seeing his mother’s face, the way Dorothy had seen Auntie Em in the crystal ball. “I’m here in Oz, Mommy! I’m locked up in Mrs. Piatrowski’s castle, and I’m trying to get home to you! Oh, Mommy, the hourglass is getting low!”

  Close-up of a crystal ball: inside, Wally’s mother is standing in the rain, hair pasted down around her face. A few clothespins are clasped between her teeth as she pulls in the drenched Fruit of the Looms from the line.

  “But Mommy said I could be a witch.”

  “No, no, Walter, I didn’t say yes.” His mother’s hands are fluttering. “I just said, ‘We’ll see.’”

  Their lives have changed overnight. Wally’s father, Captain Robert Eugene Day, has come home. Whether Wally’s mother was expecting him, Wally doesn’t know—but Wally certainly wasn’t.

  “No son of mine is going to be a witch for Halloween,” Captain Day says.

  “But that’s what I want to be!”

  “What you want isn’t always what you get, son.” His father considers the subject closed. “You’ll need to learn that sooner or later.”

  The boy stands in the middle of the living room looking at his father, who sits in the big La-Z-Boy that no one ever uses while he’s gone. But Captain Day doesn’t return his son’s gaze. He opens the Brown’s Mill Reminder and begins to read.

  Ever since he can remember, Wally has thought his father was very handsome. Wally likes how square his father’s face is, how dark and shiny is his hair. And his uniform: it’s shiny, too, with all those gold buttons and medals. Wally especially loves his father’s hat. Inside there’s a shiny satin lining that Wally loves to touch and place against his face. They have lots of photos of him wearing his father’s hat.

  “There he is,” his father will say when he sees the photos. “My son, the future admiral!”

  But it’s not a navy hat that he wants to wear for Halloween. It’s a tall black pointed witch’s hat he desires, and Wally heads down the hallway to sulk in his room.

  “You can go as the Scarecrow if you want,” his father calls after him. “Or the Lion. We can get you a Lion’s costume.”

  “I don’t want to be the Lion.”

  “Well, those are your choices. Pick one of those or don’t go trick-or-treating.”

  Wally stops walking. “Okay, I won’t go.”

  To him, his answer is not sass. His father gave him a choice, and Wally merely chose the least objectionable option offered.

  Captain Day, however, hears it differently. He looks up suddenly, throws down his newspaper, and leaps out of his chair in a terrible, violent flash. In seconds Wally’s small arm is twisted behind his back and his father is spanking him hard, ten times on his baby butt.

  Wally cries for his mother, but she is nowhere to be seen.

  Iris-in on hands, kneading soil, sifting out stones through the fingers. Open to reveal Wally’s mother, in her rock garden, planting chrysanthemums. She’s wearing a kerchief as she kneels in the dirt. It’s a bright, sunny day, and she’s humming. Camera pulls back to reveal Wally not far away, playing with his Matchbox cars at the perimeter of the garden.

  “Be careful when you play in here that you don’t dig up the mums, Wally,” his mother says. He makes a sound in his throat in acknowledgment.

  Panorama of the yard: young, tender trees held up by wooden posts and white ribbon. A few blue lawn chairs are scattered near the patio, and a picnic table is topped by a slightly crooked red umbrella with white fringe. The back of the house hasn’t been completely painted yet; much of it is still bare wood. The half that’s finished is painted green: primary green, like kindergarten crayons. It’s a ranch-style house, one floor and an attached garage that’s still under construction. A blue rubber hose is coiled like a long, beneficent snake beneath the kitchen windows. Similar houses line the cul-de-sac, their half-acre lots evenly drawn, connecting to each other, dotted here and there by newly planted shrubs. Nobody has much grass, but lots of grass seed.

  Wally’s getting bored with the Matchboxes. He trots over to watch his mother plant flowers. He loves her rock garden. She’s taught him the names of all her flowers. Mostly marigolds, but she has others, too, depending on the season: daffodils and narcissi, petunias and portulaca, pansies and petunias, sweet williams and Johnny-jump-ups. She’s putting in some late-blooming mums, hoping to keep as much color in the garden before frost.

  “Can I plant one?”

  “All right, Walter.”

  “Show me how.”

  She digs a small hole in the soil with her hand and places the tender young plant inside. “Press the soil firmly around the stem,” she says. “A flower needs a strong base from which to grow.”

  Wally reaches over for a mum, gently pulling it from the box of four Mom had bought at Grant’s. He shakes its roots free from those of its siblings.

  “Mommy,” he asks as he pats down the earth around the plant, “who do you love more, me or Daddy?”

  “Oh, Walter, what a thing to ask.”

  “I like it better when he’s not here.”

  “That’s not very nice.”

  “I don’t want to be a Lion, Mommy.”

  She puts her hand over his, covering it. Wally looks down at her hand. Her blue veins stand up prominently and her wedding band is worn dull. Her chipped pink nails are caked with soil.

  “Your Daddy just wants you to grow up to be big and strong like he is,” she tells him.

  “But I’m not like him, Mommy.” Wally turns his eyes up to her. “I’m like you.”

  Cut to black.

  He loves his mother more than anything in the world. More than The Wizard of Oz. More than his Matchboxes. More than Peter on The Brady Bunch. More even than Freddie Piatrowski, who Wally had announced in kindergarten as the person he would someday marry.

  “Boys don’t marry boys,” his teacher had chided him, while the rest of class laughed. Wally’s cheeks burned.

  “You’ll see,” his father is telling him. “They’re all going to laugh at you.”

  They’re in the living room. His father is watching Wally’s mother fit him in his costume.

  “Then you’ll say I was right. When they laugh at you, you’ll wish you had listened to me.”

  “Hold still, Walter.”

  His mother is measuring the black cloth around the boy’s waist, marking it with a safety pin. Wally looks down at the back of her blond head and feels his love for her just bursting out of his chest.

  His mother is making him a witch’s costume.

  “But what about the hat?” Wally asks. “How are we going to make the hat?”

  His mother gets up from her knees. Her joints crack and she winces a little from the pain. She opens the closet in the living room and withdra
ws a box.

  “What’s inside, Mommy?”

  She removes the lid and lifts out a cardboard cone. It’s white and has no brim, but Wally can see the possibilities.

  “I had it made at the craft shop,” his mother tells him. “We’ll have to paint it black and add some cardboard around the bottom to make it look like a witch’s hat.”

  Wally beams, placing the cone on his head.

  “It’s a dunce cap,” his father says, finally looking over. “You’ll see, Wally. They’re all going to laugh at you.”

  One time, when Wally was staying with Aunt Selma and Uncle Axel, he’d fallen out of a tree. He hated staying with them. Uncle Axel told him scary stories and dribbled tobacco juice down his chin, so Wally had climbed up into the tree to get away. But on his way back down, he’d lost his footing and fallen flat on his stomach, knocking out his wind. Flapping his arms wildly, Wally tried to gulp air into his lungs, but it felt as if he were drowning. Uncle Axel just stood there, laughing at the sight of Wally flailing about, wheezing and turning blue. So hard did the old man laugh that afterward he got hiccups, for which he cursed the boy.

  Wally hates being laughed at.

  Another time, in one of those bizarre, unexplainable hysterias that suddenly take over children, Wally’s entire class had decided to taunt him with “Wally Gator, he’s a swinging alligator in the swamp!” Friends one day, tormenters the next. They ganged up around him in the schoolyard and sang at him as if the inane cartoon lyrics were curses. “See ya later, Wally Gator!”

  And then they laughed.

  “I don’t care,” Wally says, standing in his room, looking at himself in the mirror with his black witch’s hat on the top of his head. His mother had done a very good job putting it together. “I don’t care if they laugh.”

  But he does. He cares a lot.

  They’re all going to laugh at you.

  He pulls the witch’s hat off his head.

  See ya later, Wally Gator!

  “I don’t want to go as a witch,” he tells his parents.

  His mother frowns. “Oh, Walter, but it took forever to make the costume—”